Professors With Two Hats

Is it just me, or have I been seeing more and more of this lately? From today's Wall Street Journal: "Andrew Lo, a finance professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a hedge-fund manager."

From today's Financial Times: "This article was co-authored by Richard Clarida, global strategic adviser at Pimco and professor of economics at Columbia University."

And of course there is Alan Blinder, professor of economics at Princeton and senior adviser at Promontory Financial Group.

And Lawrence Summers, who was professor of economics at Harvard and $5.2 million a year, one-day-a-week adviser to the D.E. Shaw hedge fund.

In principle and perhaps even in practice, this is great: students get exposure to actual businessmen rather than just ivory-tower academics. Which means that sometimes in the next year or so you can expect a big newspaper or magazine investigative piece highly critical of the supposed conflicts of interest these arrangements entail, along with follow-on congressional hearings, along the lines of the New York Times piece over the weekend (which curiously omitted Lee Bollinger) about university presidents who serve on corporate boards.